🔬 Cloud Security • Threat Analysis

   

      AWS X-Ray Service Hijacked to Run as Secret Command & Control Channel    

   

By CyberDudeBivash • October 06, 2025 • Technical Threat Report

 

      cyberdudebivash.com |       cyberbivash.blogspot.com    

 

 

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Disclosure: This is a technical analysis for cloud security and DevOps professionals. It contains affiliate links to relevant enterprise security solutions. Your support helps fund our independent research.

  Threat Report: Table of Contents  

   
1. Chapter 1: Living Off the Cloud — The New Frontier of C2 Evasion
   
2. Chapter 2: Threat Analysis — The AWS X-Ray C2 Channel Explained
   
3. Chapter 3: The Defender's Playbook — A Hunting Guide for Cloud Security Teams
   
4. Chapter 4: The Strategic Response — IAM is the New Perimeter
 

 

Chapter 1: Living Off the Cloud — The New Frontier of C2 Evasion

 

Sophisticated threat actors are evolving. They are moving away from using their own malicious domains for command and control (C2) and are instead adopting a far stealthier technique: **"Living off the Cloud."** This involves abusing legitimate, trusted cloud services—the very tools your developers and applications use every day—to hide their malicious communications. This new TTP renders traditional network-based defenses, like firewalls and IP blocklists, almost completely useless. The latest and most creative example of this is the hijacking of the **AWS X-Ray** service to create a nearly undetectable C2 channel.

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Chapter 2: Threat Analysis — The AWS X-Ray C2 Channel Explained

 

The attack is a brilliant abuse of a legitimate application monitoring service. To understand it, you must first have a compromised AWS IAM key with, at a minimum, the `xray:PutTraceSegments` permission.

The C2 Mechanism:

1. Command Injection:** The attacker, operating from their own machine, uses the stolen AWS key. They make a legitimate AWS API call to `PutTraceSegments`, creating a new trace. Inside this trace, they add a custom **Annotation** containing their Base64-encoded command (e.g., `{"command": "d2hvYW1p"}`).
2. **The Implant:** Malware running on a compromised EC2 instance within your VPC is programmed to periodically poll the AWS X-Ray service via the API using `GetTraceSummaries` or `BatchGetTraces`.
3. **Command Retrieval:** The implant looks for traces with a specific, pre-defined name. It retrieves the trace, reads the annotation, decodes the command (`whoami`), and executes it on the EC2 instance.
4. **Data Exfiltration:** To send data back, the implant executes the command, encodes the output, and then uses `PutTraceSegments` to create a *new* trace segment, placing the output in another annotation. The attacker can then read this trace to see the command's result.

To your firewall, this entire exchange is just a series of legitimate, TLS-encrypted API calls to a trusted AWS endpoint. It is perfectly camouflaged.

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Chapter 3: The Defender's Playbook — A Hunting Guide for Cloud Security Teams

 

When you can't trust your network logs, you must shift your hunt to identity and the endpoint.

1. Hunt in Your CloudTrail Logs

Every API call is logged in AWS CloudTrail. This is your ground truth.
The Golden Query: Search for anomalous `xray:` API calls. A web server in production might legitimately send trace data, but a database server or a developer's test machine should probably never be calling the X-Ray API. Look for an IAM role or user making `PutTraceSegments` and `GetTraceSummaries` calls that are outside of its normal baseline behavior.

2. Hunt on the Endpoint (CWPP/EDR)

The most effective defense is on the workload itself. A Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) or an EDR agent on your EC2 instance gives you the necessary visibility.
The Golden Query: Hunt for any unexpected processes that are making AWS SDK calls. Specifically, look for a process that is not your application's code making API calls to `xray.amazonaws.com`. A generic process like `bash` or `python` making these calls is a massive red flag.

    Cloud-Native Visibility is Key: Detecting these threats requires a purpose-built cloud security solution. **Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security** provides a unified platform with both CSPM (for auditing IAM roles) and CWPP (for monitoring the workload itself), giving you the multi-layered visibility needed to uncover these stealthy TTPs.  

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Chapter 4: The Strategic Response — IAM is the New Perimeter

 

This attack technique is a powerful illustration of a fundamental shift in cloud security. The old model of a network perimeter secured by a firewall is obsolete. In the cloud, **Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the new perimeter.**

The root cause of this attack is not a network failure, but an identity failure: a stolen, over-privileged IAM key. The strategic defense, therefore, is a relentless focus on **IAM hygiene and a Zero Trust mindset**:

• **Least Privilege:** Every IAM role for your EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and users must be scoped down to the absolute minimum set of permissions required. An EC2 instance that doesn't use X-Ray should have a policy that explicitly denies `xray:*` actions.
• **Credential Management:** Never hardcode IAM keys in your source code, as we've warned in our **reports on GitHub secrets leaks**. Use IAM roles for EC2 instances wherever possible.

By treating every identity as its own micro-perimeter, you can contain the blast radius of a compromised credential and prevent an attacker from abusing your own cloud services against you.

 

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About the Author

   

CyberDudeBivash is a cybersecurity strategist with 15+ years in cloud security, threat hunting, and DevSecOps, advising CISOs on securing modern cloud-native environments. [Last Updated: October 06, 2025]

 

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